This invention relates to beverage carriers and more particularly refers to a new and improved beverage carrier of the returnable enclosed type which may be utilized to carry full beverage containers away from a retail outlet and also to return the empty beverage containers to the retail outlet in the same package.
Beverage carriers of the type utilizing the applicant's invention are generally constructed for use with glass beverage containers such as beer or soft drinks. One way beverage carriers have been designed using prior art techniques for the express purpose of carrying full beverage containers to the home of the user with the carrier being physically destroyed whenever the containers are removed from the package. These types of carriers were popular in times past with the advent of the one-way, no deposit, throw away bottle.
With the recent thrust toward eliminating so many no deposit bottles from the market place for ecology an aesthetic reasons, two-way or returnable deposit type bottles have been coming back into style. In conjunction with this move toward two-way returnable bottles, recent trends seem to indicate that the beverage consumer desires larger size packages containing more bottles than the usual six pack which previously was the standard size package for home consumption. In today's marketplace, the trend appears to be going toward providing beverage carriers having at least twelve bottles contained in the carrier.
With the thrust toward the larger size carriers, the problem is encountered of designing a package having sufficient structural strength and integrity to carry the large number of full bottles of beverage with the package being provided with some way of removing all of the bottles from the package without destroying the package itself. Accordingly, the ultimate purpose of a returnable enclosed beverage carrier is to allow the contents of the package to be removed and still to be able to use the same package for carrying the empty bottles back to the retail outlet.